Aisha Khan, The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. xiv + 223 pp. (Cloth US$ 41.00)
J. Brent Crosson, Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. xiv + 322 pp. (Paper US$ 32.00)
Stuart Earl Strange, Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname. Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 2021. xiv + 281 pp. (Paper US$ 36.00)
With these books joining the quickly growing scholarly chorus on the topic, obeah may soon rival Carnival as a focal point in Caribbean studies. Aisha Khan’s historical study and Brent Crosson’s ethnographic work complement each other regarding obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean. Khan is additionally concerned with the commemorative tradition racialized as “Indian” and known as Hosay, a counterpoint to “African” obeah in her delineation of the intertwined vicissitudes of race and religion in the region. Crosson is similarly concerned with the colonial-modern construction and politics of religion, yet focused on Trinidad and Tobago. Stuart Strange’s ethnography of Hindu and Ndyuka Maroon spirit mediumship and political culture is likewise focused on these issues within the even-more-complex sociocultural space of Suriname. Individually and together, the three books make critical contributions to Caribbean anthropology and history, with Strange and Khan illustrating the virtues of comparativism. All probe tensions embodied by each tradition’s dynamic multiplexity and the ways they get differentially employed and re-racialized in contentious boundary-making projects. I begin with Khan.
Plantations, built on predatory exploitation, were slowburn “climates of crisis” that made the colonial Caribbean an archipelago of simmering opposition and resistance. Postemancipation society became a contradictory liberal twilight zone in which slavery had been abolished yet the “new” political economy of labor was dominated by half-free indentureship and continued criminalization of labor noncompliance. As vehicles of subaltern cultural activity and oppositional ritual praxis, obeah and Hosay were policed by authorities via criticism and criminalization in order to contain their insurrectionary potential. This was complicated ideologically and politically by formal British commitment to “freedom,” but with the operative question being how to sanction religious liberty while disciplining subjugated laboring populations practicing cultural forms rightly seen as potentially dangerous and therefore “illegitimate.”
Subject to a differing colonial ideology of racial subordination, indentured Indians were inserted into the pressure cooker of mid-nineteenth-century society that within a generation of “freedom” began erupting into roiling labor unrest throughout the region and gained momentum and intensity across the latter half of the nineteenth century among subalterns of both Indian and African descent. Hosay became a metonym for the “coolie problem,” and thus was progressively criminalized over the course of the late nineteenth century, with police and citizen-militia antagonism, reaching a bloody climax in the 1884 Hosay massacre in south Trinidad. Two of The Deepest Dye’s chapters survey the history of Hosay, originally a Shii Islamic Arab commemoration marking the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandsons Husayn and Hassan in the late seventh century CE that became Persianized as it expanded eastward during the Middle Ages, then Sunnified as well as Hinduized as it later materialized in South Asia, all before entering the colonial West Indies. The paraphernalia and practices of this processional tradition are not Khan’s focus except for what they signify ideologically. She emphasizes how colonial disciplinary discourses both drew upon, and in turn contributed to, the repression of obeah. Public debate about colonial-era Hosay was complicated not only by tensions and contradictions inherent in colonial British liberalism but also by internal debate and dissension among diasporic Indo-Caribbean Muslims about Hosay regarding the bounds of proper “Islamic” praxis.
Chapter 5, “The Spirit of Hosay Today,” considers Hosay’s postcolonial transformation into a prominent ethnic “heritage” tradition within the annual multiculturalist dramaturgy of Trinidad and Tobago. Curiously, for an analysis that foregrounds the interpellating role of criminalization in the sociohistorical vicissitudes of obeah and Hosay, Khan does not discuss Hosay’s decriminalization; she not-so-simply fast-forwards to the postcolonial period and picks up the thread there. She interrogates Hosay’s enduring racialization as “Indian” in spite of its ongoing intercultural dynamism. She also explores problems of festivalization, disclosing overlapping layers, levels, and politics precipitated by Hosay’s polymorphousness. She draws on fieldwork materials from the late 1980s and brief research trips in the twenty-first century. Her characterization of Hosay “today” is a bit off, however, in claiming contemporary shrinking of its public face, which is not really the case in Trinidad, where the northern tradition continues to enjoy high-profile attention on the nation’s tourism-inflected annual calendar, and the southern tradition remains vibrant on its own beat.
The obeah plotline is historically deeper, yet relatively more stable over the longue durée. Whereas Hosay climaxes in public processional spectacle and has ranged between the extremes of criminalized plantation protest and postcolonial street party, as a magico-religious complex practiced by African and Afro-Caribbean slaves and ex-slaves and their descendants, the disparate set of practices known collectively as “obeah” was demonized and repressed all along, having consolidated into something structurally akin to its contemporary configuration more than a century ago. Colonial repression continued apace after emancipation—progressively entangled with Hosay in intertextual politico-juridical terms—since labor discipline and subaltern population control came to depend even more on “cultural” regulation in the absence of a slave-based legal-and-penal code. Late nineteenth-century political-economic unrest saw an uptick in obeah arrests and prosecutions alongside those related to Hosay as well. Yet the space of obeah praxis has always been more individualistic and transactional in subaltern contexts away from the public gaze and direct machinery of colonial surveillance.
Thus the problem with policing obeah for colonial authorities centered on how to discipline and control private trafficking in the occult, which occasioned strategically ambiguous and legally capacious criminal codification of “obeah” that gave significant leeway to colonial police and magistrates, and which was often exploited by those in power along the way. Authorities emphasized the alleged difference between legitimate “religion” and illegitimate “magic.” Yet the occultic invisibility of obeah paradoxically compelled an obsession on the part of authorities with its ritual paraphernalia and material infrastructure, which only dramatized the contradictions of colonial liberalism and its hypocritical commitment to religious liberty and freedom of cultural expression. Hence the colonial plantocracy found itself engaged in all sorts of magical thinking of its own in its attempts to discipline and control Afro-Caribbean peoples. Despite its disparagement of obeah as primitive hocus-pocus, the establishment could never ignore the underlying insurrectionary implication of Blackfolk conjuring power by working their magic.
Similar to Hosay, obeah has been dynamically reformulated and creolized, including being multiracially patronized and practiced, but at the same time singularly racialized. Yet unlike “Indian” Hosay, “African” obeah has remained largely marginalized, even in countries where it has been decriminalized. Khan accounts for this contrasting sociopolitical fate of obeah in terms of its under-the-radar individualistic praxis overdetermined by continuing anti-Black racism. Obeah and Hosay were differentially racialized as illegitimate forms of religiousness within the colonial framework, yet Hosay ultimately fared otherwise in the postcolonial nationalist-into-multiculturalist dispensation, whereas obeah continues to be sociosymbolically repressed. Khan takes up obeah in contemporary times through several diasporic case studies of obeah in popular culture and legal machinations, concluding that bias and stigma against obeah are alive and well in the present. This is no doubt true, but she vacates the scene of the rest of the book—the Anglophone Caribbean—here by not only turning her attention to the diaspora when it comes to contemporary obeah, but also focusing on obeah’s representational politics in expressive culture and law.
Deepest Dye is comparative history written with the sensibility of an anthropologist. Khan’s thesis about the complex and enduring entanglements of religion and race and the interpellating power of dominant categories is similar to that regarding Indo-Trinidadian Hindus and Muslims in her first book, Callaloo Nation (2004). The new work draws on the power of the comparative method in examining two “ostensibly quite dissimilar things.” However, Khan relexifies this perspective by calling it “parallax” and avoids engaging with other scholars explicitly working through comparison and developing analytical conceptualizations derived from systematically toggling between Afro- and Indo-Caribbean materials. Her discussion of inverted mirror-image colonial ideological demonization of obeah versus Hosay in terms of inversely illegitimate notions of “savage” versus “coolie” religious sociality is illuminating. Her project here is to compare the histories of obeah and Hosay in order to better understand each of them in terms of how they embody differential forms of intertwined racialization-religionization on their own terms; yet she does not use their juxtaposition as a fulcrum for theorizing why they have met with highly contrasting contemporary fates and what this portends about the fraught nexus of religion and race in the present moment in the Anglophone Caribbean, much less Atlantic world.
Brent Crosson’s Experiments with Power is an ethnographic exploration of obeah and popular religiosity in Trinidad, in relation to which he pursues an extended interrogation of the dominant ideological construction of the colonial-modern-Western categories of “religion” and “science.” Anyone wanting fine-grained details about the practices that get corralled into the category “obeah” will be disappointed, as Crosson—like Khan—is more interested in the politics of categories in terms of the conceptual work they do shoring up dominant power structures and reproducing inequalities in relation to the oppositional critique and alter-cultural potential “obeah” represents as well. The project evolved initially from a defense and recuperation of obeah as a legitimate form of “religion” to an examination of the polyvalence of obeah-in-praxis that—at times and in oblique ways—expresses a subalternative vision of justice giving the lie to ideal posturings of religion, statecraft and the law, not to mention science’s overblown pretentions to rationality. What if, Crosson asks, obeah/magic/superstition operates irrepressibly in the liminal zone between “science” and “religion” in ways we hypocritically disparage and disavow to our conceptual and moral peril?
He counters these obfuscations through critical reflections on law, violence, and the sophistry of statecraft routed through analyses of ethnographic anecdotes and case studies of obeah and spiritism in relation to two major episodes of national significance that occurred in his “deep south” field site during the longest period of his fieldwork in 2010–11. He reveals “obeah” to be a heterogeneous panoply of magico-religious practices of popular mysticism trafficking with subaltern diasporic and proletarian local spirits as well as the dead. He is less interested in the minutiae of ritual performance than the way these practices articulate alternative movement for justice by underprivileged citizen-subjects of this twin-island petrostate. He discusses the so-called “possessions” and “mass hysteria” among high-school girls in the area in 2010, which became a major media spectacle and focus of public debate; and the 3.5-month State-of-Emergency imposed by the then-People’s Partnership government led by Kamla Persad Bissessar’s (Indo-Trinidadian) United National Congress in late 2011, which designated national crime “hot spots”—including Crosson’s field site, where police used the sports field as a helicopter landing-pad, raided local marijuana fields, and murdered three young people in an act of extrajudicial killing that was subsequently exposed (due to obeah, according to some).
Wakes for the victims were large and their momentum super-charged the swell of public protests staged for weeks in the area, with people chanting “the police don’t know what obeah does do.” The spiritual father to one of the victims opted to bury her facing down—in contravention of normal practice—in order to mobilize her spirit in a retaliatory “lash.” The mystical power of obeah is like a double-edged sword, cutting both positively and negatively. Obeah emerges as a subaltern system of justice, pursuing spiritual vengeance and experiments with reality in the face of the epic shortcomings of law and the judiciary. Crosson explores electrical metaphors in spiritism that clarify the moral ambivalence of obeah and the ways it helps practitioners and clients navigate the fraught polarities of the security state. Attempting to purify obeah of its negative side only reinscribes the ideologies of “good” religion and “bad” magic that have undergirded obeah’s demonization all along. Crosson also considers the cultural politics of animal sacrifice and ideological machinations of “blood” in terms of local constructions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as well as the strategic ways spiritists operate betwixt-and-between various strands and traditions of proletarian religious and ritual praxis in a sort of code-switching manner that Crosson calls “crossover” within the ever-shifting contingencies of personal circumstances.
All of these practices represent experimentation with reality that locals refer to as “science.” Crosson’s final chapter dwells within this vernacular conceptual space equating “obeah” and “science,” foregrounding obeah’s experimental posture and undermining conventional science’s exclusivistic claims to rationality. All lived religions evince complex contingent ethics and strategic instrumentalities in practice, yet “obeah” has been singled out for castigation as instrumental-magical-amoral in an ideological move that constructs elite and state-sanctioned religious formations as moral-communal-pure. Obeah may therefore be seen as religion’s shadowy alter-ego and counternarrative. Crosson’s contribution is solid, provocative, and insightful, though at times he rhetorically overplays the novelty of some of his contributions. Indeed, the genre conventions of ethnographic “science” do necessitate their own forms of academic obeah.
Stuart Strange’s Suspect Others takes a fascinating ethnographic journey through the complex ethno-religious world and ritual spaces of spirit mediumship among Hindus and Ndyuka Maroons in contemporary Suriname. Strange is interested in many of the same dynamics and issues as Crosson and Khan, yet he is much more influenced by linguistic anthropology and the study of kinship. Suriname is more diverse and therefore ethnoracially complicated than Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, given the additional presence of Javanese-descent Muslims and six Maroon tribal nations, of which Ndyuka is one. Indo-Surinamese (“Hindustanis”) are the largest ethnic group at 28 per cent of the national population. Maroons are the fastest-growing minority (26 per cent); progressively pushed out of the rainforest interior by extractive industries, they have been migrating to coastal areas and Paramaribo. As Indo-Surinamese have moved away from agriculture, increasing numbers of them have become landowners and come to dominate the local construction and other capital-intensive businesses, bringing them into increasing coexistence and direct relations with Maroons, who remain the poorest and most marginalized group.
Most of Strange’s multisited fieldwork, conducted in Sarnami, Ndyuka, Sranan, English, and Dutch, was intermittently undertaken between 2007 and 2013, living among Hindustanis, but spending more time with Ndyukas. His “parallax” study of Hindu and Ndyuka mediumship involves corollary notions of personhood and patterns of praxis within their respective communities, rooted within a capacious multidimensional account of material life and political culture rooted in deeply contrasting colonial genealogies of dispossession and matrilineal Ndyuka versus patrilineal Hindustani kinship structures. Strange is concerned with the ways these forms of praxis both reflect and contribute to society-wide suspicion, doubt, and mistrust within and between groups. While many Surinamese affirm the reality of spiritual power, proletarian mysticism trafficking in esoteric knowledge is inevitably entangled within the national environment of doubt and suspicion so deeply conditioned by its history.
Strange shows how mythic paradigms operationalized in mediumship praxis generate doubts expressing key uncertainties in Hindu and Ndyuka self-knowledge connected with the way each group understands and has experienced itself. Indo-Surinamese mediumship is centered primarily within the context of Shakti Worship, which has been influenced by an extended influx of Indo-Guyanese Hindus since the 1970s. Examining Hindu mediumship and the clients and afflictions it addresses discloses the tensions and compromises of Hindustani personhood, balanced between egalitarianism and hierarchy. Ndyuka notions of self and experience expressed through obiya spiritism are more multiple than Hindu conceptions, even while employing similar modalities of trance, clairvoyance, and healing. Ndyuka “polyphonic” selfhood is composed from a multiplicity of kin-mediated spirit identities.
Strange considers the challenges of pain and the alter-cultural significance of dreams within Hindu and Ndyuka knowledge and praxis to better grasp their respective epistemologies, disclosing fascinating similarities and differences between these ethno-religious traditions, all of which is complicated by being situated within the wider context of “racecraft” in Suriname. He illustrates how mediumship and racecraft operate according to inverse logics vis-à-vis ancestry, therefore representing competing paradigms of suspicion, showing “how Surinamese Maroons and Hindus attempt to resolve insistent apprehensions about self-knowledge, belonging, and responsibility, yet remain unsettled by what their solutions mean for how they should live in a rapidly-changing multi-ethno-racial and religious nation” (p. 6). By definition, mediumship operates at an uncertain existential crossroads, yet it is additionally complicated by Suriname’s abject position within the world-system, raising the stakes for the sacred arts.
Strange’s mapping of the conceptual-discursive contours of personhood is what psychological anthropology calls ethnopsychology; however, he does not gather the person-centered materials that would give his comparative cultural phenomenology more psychological depth. He also conflates the critical distinction between “self” and “person” long made by psychological anthropologists, and he takes for granted the ideal-type figure of the ostensibly autonomous Western self so ably deconstructed and reframed by the late Melford Spiro. Interestingly, Strange employs the phraseology of pluralism more than most Caribbeanists in the wake of the creole-versus-plural-society debate. Yet if anywhere is “plural,” then Suriname is it. And pluralism is integral to his argument about the conflicted-yet-constitutive significance of envy, suspicion, and doubt in Surinamese society. While insightful, to be sure, it becomes a totalizing metanarrative by the end. One must also ask whether Strange’s argument is about Suriname, or whether it extends to the Caribbean, not to mention the Americas, or even modernity at-large? Never mind human nature.